Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Run Jerry Run

I ran into Jerry Brown the other day. Or, rather, he ran into me. Literally.

I was out for a bike ride in the Oakland hills and stopped at Redwood Regional Park to fill up my water bottle. Suddenly, up jogs Jerry, in his sweats, chugging along the trail. As he caught his breath and got some water from the fountain, I said hello. He recognized me but couldn't remember my name, something that has happened many times between us over the past 25 years. I reintroduced myself, and he asked me if I was still at KCBS. I said I was, and complimented him on his impressive fitness for a man of 72. He'd run perhaps a mile and a half from his house on Skyline Boulevard.

We proceeded to have a remarkable and revealing chat about his race for governor. As strange a human being as he can be, Brown is almost always open and forthright. He can veer into esoteric tangents, but he tells it like it is (or at least how he sees it) and rarely pulls a punch.

I asked him if he intended to debate Meg Whitman, once she locked up the Republican nomination for governor (which she did Tuesday night, trouncing Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner). He said he'd like to have "many" debates with her - and indeed, he has since formally challenged Whitman to a series of ten town hall-style debates (Whitman dismissed his challenge as "playing political games" and said Brown should lay out some detailed policies so they'll have something to debate).

I asked him how he could possibly compete with her vast campaign treasury - Whitman spent $71 million of her own money on the primary, and is ready to write checks for $80 million more to crush Brown. She also raised about ten million from donors, and there will be more where that came from, from supporters and from the Republican Party.

Brown boasted about his legendary frugality. "I've only spent $200,000 so far. I have 20 million in the bank. I'm saving up for her." It's true - his stay-on-the-sidelines, bare-bones primary run cost him almost nothing, at least in California political terms. But he also fretted about the impact of all those eBay dollars in Whitman's very deep pockets. "You know, by the time she's done with me, two months from now, I'll be a child-molesting..." He let the line trail off. "She'll have people believing whatever she wants about me." Then he went off on a riff I didn't expect.

"It's like Goebbels," referring to Hitler's notorious Minister of Propaganda. "Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be president. That's her ambition, the first woman president. That's what this is all about."

I pointed out that most politicians want to be president someday. Gavin Newsom, for example. "Sure, sure he does. But they can't control it. Look at Barack Obama, he got in and it's all out of his control. I wanted to be president. I ran for president three times, you know."

Uh, yeah, we know. No kidding, Jer.

At that point, some other runners stopped to say hello, recognizing Brown. I suggested it must be tough for him to get a run in, with people always wanting to talk to him.

"No, no one ever wants to talk to me. You're the oddball. You're the only one." He turned to the newcomers. "Hi, I used to be your mayor. I was the last Mayor of Oakland," a dig at current, less-than-constantly-visible Mayor Ron Dellums. "Oakland could use a mayor, it hasn't had one since I left office."

"You know," turning back to me, "we've got to do something about energy in this country. I just looked it up on the Internet. We only produce five million barrels of oil a day, but we consume 20 million. There's no balance there. We need a balance." He pointed to my bicycle. "People need to ride bikes, or walk more." Then he started saying something obscure about use value vs. exchange value. I told him I had no interest in exchanging my bike for anything, so therefore it only had use value for me. "Then that's subsistence. You believe in subsistence. But most people, they want exchange value, they want something in return for their goods."

He started musing about Whitman again. "She looks like an athlete. You think she's an athlete?" I said that she's certainly tall, towering above me (which isn't saying much). "Yeah," he said, "she could probably outrun me."

At this point, I had already stopped far longer than intended, and I told him I needed to start riding again. "What do you think," he asked me, "should I keep running? Should I go a little farther?" Why not, I answered. Go for it. "You've given me a nice little break here, " he said with a smile. I told him I looked forward to talking with him again, on the campaign trail next time, instead of on West Ridge Trail, or maybe on the panel of one of those debates.

"I feel recharged. I think I'll get back on the trail and run a little farther." And he trotted off, lean and frugal, with an awkward smile. "Let's see how far I can get."

After calling his Republican rivals "the apostles of darkness and ignorance" on Monday, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown pledged this morning that his campaign would engage in "no mudslinging."

This is a 72 year old man who for the entirety of his adult life has never had a clue. The odd thing is Jerry Brown is not the problem. The problem is the even more clueless fools that have elected him to public office. Disgraceful...

Funny how liberals love to invoke the Nazi, Hitler, anti-Semitic references when Hitler and his ilk were leftist progressives. The leftist agenda to attach Hitler and Nazism to the right has been relentless since the 1930s. Brown and his leftist agenda has hurt California throughout his political career.

jerry is just another libotard looking for old glory. good god califorica is under liberal leadership now ( the terminator) what they need is a real conservative to run the libotards out of the state along with the mexican trash and deport the ones in their prisons and get a little fiscal responsibility going on

Please remind me to never go on a bike ride with you! My god... How can you reprint a private conversation like this? Sure, say you ran into him, say that he looked fit or looked like a kook, but actually quoting what he said? That's out of line, even if you are a reporter.

I work in politics and do lots of bike rides with reporters - and that environment is always off the record.

Well, we sure have some interesting comments on here, now that the Drudge Report has picked up on this! Thanks for weighing in, everybody! To William: I didn't mention the "Big Lie" because I just wanted to report what he said at face value, and not elaborate on Goebbels; to the Anonymous political worker who said bike rides are off the record - that's not the way it works. I've spent lots of private, non-working time with politicians - they have to ask that something be off the record, and we have to agree. There is never an off the record "assumption." I consulted with quite a few journalists and an ethics expert before deciding to run this; 100% said it was fair game.

Quality, balanced blog entry. What I have come to expect from you and your coworkers Doug. It's refreshing to have a reporter who can both agree, disagree, and play devils advocate with a political figure without losing the professional tone or interrupting them to fulfill their demographics agenda. It's sad that kind of comment can be even made nowadays. Keep up the great work. I say you should moderate the debates (if either of them can make the commitment).

It's probably unfair to interview Brown after he ran a mile or so. However, he should be smart enough in any mental state to know this type of Nazi comment is always off limits. The guy seems like a lunatic.

No William, I didn't "make it sound" like anything. Readers can draw their own conclusions. Brown likened Whitman's ad blitz to Goebbels' propaganda machine. End of story. He never used the word Nazi. He didn't bring up the Big Lie (which I would hope most readers would already know about, since the concept was much-discussed during the Bush administration, especially after no WMDs were found in Iraq). Not my place to guess what's going on in Brown's head, or explain what I think he meant. And I also didn't "play up" the Nazi angle either; it was one passage in the middle of the blog, and no one even mentioned it in the first 25 or so very positive emails and comments I received, until the Whitman campaign publicized it. And yes, sadly, I am way too busy to blog more than every few weeks, except when covering a special event or story, in which case I blog daily. Thanks for reading, and for commenting.

Doug, you say you assumed that everyone would get the "Big Lie" reference, yet no one has mentioned it in the reports I've seen. Nor did anyone mention it here until I did.

The reports all play up the Nazi angle, which is why the Whitman campaign placed your blog on the Drudge Report, which was hardly a surprise after you played it up:

>Then he went off on a riff I didn't expect.

"It's like Goebbels," referring to Hitler's notorious Minister of Propaganda. "Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be president. That's her ambition, the first woman president. That's what this is all about."

"Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda...."Once again Ex. Gov. Moonbeam gets history wrong. Goebbels learned this type of propaganda from non other than our Progressive, racist, 28th president, Woodrow Wilson. And he gives Wilson full credit in his personal writings. In any case, if the dear people of CA vote this clown back into office, they will have no one other than themselves to blame when the Golden State finally falls into the Pacific.

Oh, that's right. I had forgotten that the Democrats invented the Nazi Party.

You know, I don't see the link to this from Drudge any longer, so I'm sure you've wandered off to the next loud clatter in the right-wing noise machine.

> Anonymous said..."Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda...."Once again Ex. Gov. Moonbeam gets history wrong.Goebbels learned this type of propaganda from non other than our Progressive, racist, 28th president, Woodrow Wilson. And he gives Wilson full credit in his personal writings. In any case, if the dear people of CA vote this clown back into office, they will have no one other than themselves to blame when the Golden State finally falls into the Pacific.

I find it abhorrent that any person who can express what Jerry Brown did comparing Goebbels to Whitman would represent me in California as my governor. I call on jerry Brown to resign from the Dem ticket.

I find it abhorrent that any person who can express what Jerry Brown did comparing Goebbels to Whitman would represent me in California as my governor. I call on Jerry Brown to resign from the Dem ticket.

It appeared at roughly the same point it did in his conversation with the former and would-be-future governor.

As for the conversation being "on the record", Brown was well aware that Doug is a working reporter and EVEN RECONFIRMED HIS CURRENT EMPLOYMENT. If he wanted it off the record, he had ample opportunity to say so.

No, Jerry Brown wants this out there. And his campaign wants to use "jogging talk" to deflect the controversy - they can have the idea in voters' heads AND say, "uh, he really didn't MEAN it."

This is an interesting and insightful post. Almost as fun as the comments.

William, you have an awful lot of time on your hands and have really elevated a relatively benign posting. You are a great asset to the Whitman campaign!

And I'm not convinced Brown is wrong in his analysis; he was just wrong/dumb to say it to a reporter. Goebbels was brilliant. I'm sure you'll take it to mean that I think the Nazis were right. I don't. If you throw enough money at anything, you have a good chance of winning (exception: PG&E). When Whitman spends her money on strategic messages and refuses to be interviewed it is pretty much propoganda. I'm no fan of Jerry Brown's, and he should have kept his pie hole shut.

But if that were the case, what would we talk about?

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About Doug

Doug began his career as a copy boy at the New York Times & then moved to California to play in a rock band. After hundreds of gigs and one Indie album failed to make him a rock star, Doug returned to journalism, working for AP Radio & San Francisco station K-101. He did a brief stint at KGO before joining KCBS in 1990. Doug covers politics for KCBS, and also does special features and investigations. He has won more than 200 broadcast journalism awards, including a duPont-Columbia Special Citation, 10 National Headliner Awards, five national Edward R. Murrow Awards & a record eight awards from the national Society of Professional Journalists - more than any other reporter, in any medium. Doug was also the first three-time winner of the AP's Reporter of the Year Award for California/Nevada & has won it four times overall.
Doug was born in New York City, raised in Manhattan and Wisconsin, and has a degree in History from Brown University. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Dr. Sara Newmann. And yes, he still plays music! He is the bass player for the Eyewitness Blues Band, made up of broadcasters from KCBS and CBS-5 TV.